The 2010 Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season includes a lot of predictions based on activity in previous years, but those predictions are all relatively safe. Here are Chad White’s top five predictions:

1. Social and rich-media campaigns won’t get much traction after mid-November. Once we get into late November and December, folks are just too busy running around and fighting traffic and the weather to spend much time with social campaigns. Same goes for rich media like video. A couple of years ago when video was all the rage, email campaigns anchored by video content evaporated once we got into the core of the holiday season. Not only are folks too busy, but during the holidays consumers turn to email for discounts and gift ideas more than anything else. Play to the channel’s strength. 

2. Discount codes will become more prominent in preheader messages and subject lines. Discount codes are highly relevant to shoppers during the holiday season. Activity last year certainly proved that. So if you’re promoting a discount code, make it super-easy to find. Instead of burying it at the bottom of the primary message, elevate it up into a preview pane banner, into your preheader message, or into your subject line. I’ve been seeing a fair number of retailers promoting discount codes in their preheaders this year — and the next step up is the subject line. Especially during the Black Friday to Cyber Monday time span when inboxes are deluged, discount codes in your subject line could attract subscribers to your email over a competitor’s. 

3. “Share with your network” (SWYN) functionality will be used more strategically. Right now SWYN links are found in the headers, share bars and footers of many emails, which is fine in general. But during the holiday season — and especially on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, when you’re likely promoting your best deals of the year — consider giving your deal a viral boost by adding another SWYN call-to-action right next to the “Buy Now” button. Make SWYN a strong secondary call-to-action, not an afterthought relegated to the margins of your email design. 

4. Designing mobile-friendly emails is more important than ever. With the rapid adoption of Android-powered phones and the continued adoption of iPhones — both of which render HTML email pretty well — the distinction between email and mobile email is falling away. Soon mobile email will just be email. Couple that with the fact that email is the No. 1 activity on smartphones, according to a recent study, and this market segment is becoming impossible to ignore. Make your emails more mobile-friendly by (1) using an informative preheader message and putting it ahead of “view with images” links and other preheader elements, (2) narrowing the width of your email template to 650 pixels or less, and (3) using larger font sizes to counteract the effect of your emails being scaled down for mobile’s small screens. 

5. At least 50% of retailers will send an email on Thanksgiving Day and at least 70% will on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. With email volume per subscriber continuing to rise, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are pretty much at the saturation point. Last year, many retailers began their Cyber Monday campaigns on the afternoon of the day before, giving rise to Cyber Sunday. I expect that phenomenon to repeat this year, plus I expect Black Friday emails to spill over into what I’ll call Black Thursday (a.k.a. Thanksgiving Day). Similar to activity on Cyber Sunday, retailers will increasingly make their Black Friday offers valid on Thursday afternoon, looking to lock in sales before the crush of email on Black Friday. 

Courtesy of Media Post 

 http://bit.ly/bnsQBV

Email marketing is relatively new to the marketing field. Keep this useful glossary to hand and your email campaigns will go with ease! 

Above-the-fold
The part of an email or web page that is visible without scrolling down.  Typically represented by the Preview Pane.

Bounce – Hard/Soft Bounce
A hard bounce is the failed delivery of an email due to a permanent reason like a non-existent address. A soft bounce is the failed delivery of an email due to a temporary issue, like a full mailbox or an unavailable server.

CPA (or Cost Per Acquisition)
A payment model in which payment is based solely on sales or registrations.

CPC (Cost per Click)
Rather than paying a cost per 1000 emails delivered, or a cost per response, some suppliers charge a sum for all the recipients that click through the email.

CPM (or Cost Per Thousand)
CPM commonly refers to the cost per 1,000 emails for distribution.

CPR (or Cost Per Response)
This term is used to track responses, where the desired result is not purchase, click-through or cost per number of emails for the campaign).

Click Through Rate (CTR)
The number of people per 100 (expressed in percentage terms) who click through to a URL in an email, banner ad, text or graphic, to view a specific web page.

Conversion Rate
This reflects the percentage of people converted into buyers (or whatever action is desired) out of the total population exposed to the conversion effort i.e. email.

Distribution (Gross)
The total number of emails sent as part of a single campaign/distribution to all (SMTP) addresses on the distribution list.

Distribution (Net)
The total number of emails sent and successfully delivered as part of a single campaign/distribution to all (SMTP) addresses on the distribution list.

HTML Email
An HTML email is perhaps the standard form for email marketing. They are rich with colour and images and contain embedded links, banner ads etc. Marketers have to keep in mind that some recipients do not want to receive their emails in HTML. However, HTML messages often pull a higher response than plain text messages.

Landing Page
The page on a website where the visitor arrives. With an email campaign, it can be the page to which the email directs user via a link.

Links
Text links, hyperlinks, graphics or images which, when clicked direct the user to another online location.

Open Rate
The percentage of emails opened in an email marketing campaign.
Opt-in (or Subscribe)
Where an individual has positively indicated that he or she wants to receive email marketing from your company.
Opt-Out (or Unsubscribe)
Where an individual requests not to be included on an email list i.e. unsubscribe.

Personalisation
The practice of writing the email to make the recipient feel that it is more personal and was sent with him or her in mind. This includes using the recipient’s name in the salutation or subject line, referring to previous purchases or offering recommendations based on previous buying patterns (like Amazon).
Preview Pane
Here you can see a snapshot of your message without fully opening the it.  It is important that you are aware of this and do not include images within the first 5-7 lines.

Privacy Policy
A clear description of a website or Data User’s policy on the use of information collected from visitors and including what they intent to do with the data.

Segmentation
This is where you separate your email list so that recipients get different content/offers based on their demographics, buying patterns etc.

Soft Opt-in
Where an individual is considered to have opted-in, on the basis that they have provided their email address during a sale or during the negotiation of a sale and other conditions are met, including that the individual was informed of how the information they provided would be used and were provided with an opportunity to opt out.

Solicited email or UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email)
Where an individual has actively invited the Data User to send the individual commercial email.

Spam
Spam is random, untargeted bulk email where recipients did not request communications from that company.

Split Testing
When the list is divided into a number of discrete cells to allow for a robust test across multiple variables such as subject line or email design. To determine optimum response, response rates are measured for each cell.

Targeting
Selecting a target audience or group of individuals likely to be interested in a certain product or service. Targeted campaigns tend to yield greater responses and fewer unsubscribers.

Tracking
Collecting and evaluating the statistics allowing you to measure the effectiveness of an email or an email campaign.
URL
A Uniform Resource Locator (URL i.e. web address) is a sequence of characters conforming to a standardized format, used for referring to resources by their location, shown in the address bar of a browser.
Viral Marketing
A type of marketing that is carried out voluntarily by a company’s customers i.e. word-of-mouth advertising. Tools such as send this page, article or website to a friend encourage people to refer or recommend your newsletter, company, product, or specific offer to others

While the recession is still in full blow online sales have gone up 15% to £50bn. Yet to really  secure  those sales retailers have found that they just have to go one step further and this time it’s personal!

Echo E-Business Management’s managing director Deborah Collier says “Personalisation gives any etailer the competitive edge. Branding is important but the ability to engage customers and understand them is crucial in tough times.”

Personalisation has been a hot topic for some time, helping brands improve one-to-one marketing, customer segmentation, up and cross-selling. But today, it’s all about predicting what the customer wants before they even know they want it and then making them think it was their decision in the first place.

One etailer springs to mind as a brilliant example of personalised shopping: Amazon. Each time you log in they suggest new books, CD’s or DVD’s according to your previous purchases. But personalisation is more complex than this.

Guy Westlake, senior product marketing manager EMEA at ecommerce provider Vignette, suggests: “The most cutting-edge technologies track customers’ actions on your site and build a profile of their wants and behaviours from there. Within one or two clicks on the site, you can build up a picture of the consumer.”

Three-step process

However, in what may be seen as personalisation heresy, Westlake explains that, as a rule, our behaviour is never that individual and even if it were, you could never give every single person exactly what they wanted. Instead, he advocates a three-step process:

• Use technology to harness the wisdom of crowds and understand your consumer to personalise the product offering. “It’s low cost, high return and has a short lead time to implement,” Westlake says.
• Personalise the online experience taking the lead from social networking. “Retailers underestimate that customers love talking to each other. They like to have ownership of brands and it creates advocates further along the loyalty ladder,” he reveals.
• Allow users to add their own further levels of personalisation. Westlake explains: “Sites such as the BBC’s draw users into the experience, create ownership of the online environment and make it a port of call rather than a sales channel.”

The biggest problem etailers face is people abandoning their baskets moments before checking out. One suggestion is to introduce a ‘Click to Call’ button allowing customers to talk through their purchase with an assistant. Customers feel reassured that they are getting the same level of service online as in store. Also, another problem is people spending a lot of time clicking through pages and abandoning the site leaving it inactive. One way to combat this is to include pop ups to remind the customer that they have un-purchased items in their basket.

Another problem is the log in procedure made simple by using Facebook connect- one click allows the site to use the data on Facebook to automatically create an online account- this speeds up the purchase process as this is where many people abandon their baskets.

Personalisation is now the new differentiating factor as retailers boost their websites and niche etailers pop up out of the blue. You want to stand out from the crowd- then make it personal.

Check out the new 2 minute video on the homepage, this will give you a quick overview of what Nourish does, how it works and how easy it is to use.

We’ll soon be adding various screencasts to help you make the most of setting up and configuring your campaigns.

We’re delighted to announce that Nourish has recently been acquired by Web Translations, a UK-based web company with a passion for Nourish.

Nourish will be back online from Monday 29 June. Woop! Woop!

Over the coming weeks, we will be adding some new features, if you’ve not already done so, please complete the survey online to give us feeback about what you like, dislike and would like to see over the coming months.

We will also be working our way through and fixing bugs that have been a cause of frustration for many users. Sorry about the recent downtime, but look forward to bringing you a new and improved service.

The New Nourish team